> i can't say it ever gripped me. i enjoy it. watch it now and again when tivo records it for me and generally find it very funny but for some reason it never had that "must see the next episode now" magic.
Me neither, but notice that that description puts it far ahead of most of the crap you can find on television these days. Especially without a $90/mo cable habit.
> "Lufthansa Systems" is a spin-off company from "Lufthansa" the airline. They provide IT to many companies, airlines (e.g. Lufthansa") and others. This does _not_ mean, that Lufthansa (the airline) will switch to linux.
Well, at least for once most of us had an excuse not to lesen the article.
> Although they've increased the average ape intelligence by nearly 40% and even bread some individuals who are able to play simple games such as snap, they are unable to develop more advanced behavious such as speach and the concept of friendship.
> It's always seemed odd to me that we are "up here" while apes and chimps are "down there" and other mammals kind of dribble down from that. Why nothing in-between?
Right now is sort of an anomaly in the family tree. For most of "human" history there were multiple species of "humans" living concurrently, and there were formerly many more species of ape alive at the same time too.
Also, the lack of in-between-ness is exaggerated by the nonlinearity of what has been going on in our species. If you compare the material culture of modern humans to that of chimps it looks like an unbridgeable gulf, but if you instead compare our material culture of 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, and 1,000,000 years ago to the current material culture of chimps, the gap really closes up.
It appears that a small difference in cognitive ability can make a huge difference when its results are allowed to accumulate over the millenia.
> It would be cool if there was some other species that slightly filled that gap bewteen us and the animals.
True, but arguably there already is. Take away the chimps and observe how wonderfully they fill the gap between ourselves and gorillas. Take away gorillas and observe how well they fill the gap between us+chimps and the other apes.
Our corner of the family tree is an interestingly dense bush as it is, and would be even more interesting if not for the extinctions over the past few million years.
> My call is either it's a hoax, or it's that missing link anthropologists have been searching for. If it's the latter, it's a huge discovery.
No one is looking for any "missing link". The fossil record is full of "missing links", and the joke is that every time you find one you create two more, one to either side.
> > this could still turn into a Vietnam-style political issue if the killing and dying continues.
> 53 Americans have been killed in Iraq in the past 101 days. That is an avg of 0.52/day. The Capital of the U.S.A., Washington D.C., had 262 murders in 2002. That is an avg of 0.72 day. More Americans are being killed in our nations capital than in Iraq.
Yep. But in the political realm it isn't that kind of hard-core rationality that matters; it's the non-rational public reaction.
Look at how many people have died from West Nile or SARS vs. AIDS in the past year, and compare that to the amount of media coverage and public hysteria they've been generating. Look at how many people died in car crashes in 2001 vs. in the terrorist attack, and compare how much news time and public reaction each gets. Look at how for the past several years the media has nationalized ever suburban child abduction story and dwelt on it for days, meanwhile barely noticing the storm of assault and murder that surrounds us. We're just really jaded about certain topics, or at any rate some do a better job of pushing our buttons better than others.
Politicians who bet too much on a calculation that people "shouldn't" care are often headed for a big surprise. Johnson never could grok the difference between what people thought and what he thought they ought to think.
> It doesn't seem like anyone really cares about Iraq any more. The protests were heavy and numerous leading up to the war, but once it began everyone seemed to abandon the cause all but entirely.
There's a curious phenomenon at work here. IIRC, a couple of weeks before the war started the only way you could squeeze > 50% US public support out of the polls was to qualify the question with "with UN authorization", and even then the support was only about 60%. Without UN authorization it was somewhere down around 40%.
Those aren't very good numbers for a democracy to embark on a war with.
However, as soon as the shooting started the "support the troops" meme kicked in, and approval skyrocketed. I suspect it's something to do with guilt, i.e. the naive notion that not supporting the war must equate to wishing our troops harm.
> This is in stark contrast to the Vietnam war, which as far as I can tell (I could be wrong) resulted in protests through its entire duration.
I think there were no protests at all early on, though they grew to an avalanche as "the cause" caught on. And as for Iraq, there doesn't seem to be much point in protesting a done deal.
However, since the "deep support" (i.e., before the shooting started) for the Iraq war was not all that broad, and since the promised wonder of a native democracy overseeing US-built schools and hospitals and rebuilding itself with oil revenues doesn't seem to be anywhere in sight, this could still turn into a Vietnam-style political issue if the killing and dying continues. (Recall how delightedly the media were announcing four consecutive days without any combat deaths just a few days ago, and compare that to the gloomy tone of the news tonight.)
IMO things have gone much better than we had any right to expect so far, but unfortunately the fat lady hasn't sung yet. If things are still going like they are now when the elections come around next year you can look to a lot of "peace with honor" campaign rhetoric, i.e. how fast can we get the hell out without admitting we're giving up on it.
And that is where the Vietnam analogy fits in. During the Vietnam war the public was treated to a steady stream of glowing reports about the phenomenal casualty ratios, but ultimately it didn't make any difference. There's a heck of a lot more to winning a war than killing lots of people, high-tech warheads or no. Especially in a democracy.
> Anyone know how the approximate cost of a current steel-and-explosive shell?
I don't know about artillery shells, but for ariel bombs there's a nice chart in the February 2003 issue of Scientific American. Range varies greatly, from about $1000 for a dumb bomb to $700,000 for a cruise missile.
The JDAM "strap-on" combo uses a $20,000 guidance kit on a $1,000 - $3,000 bomb. There are other more expensive systems listed in the table as well, e.g. various types of cluster bombs cost $14,000 - $300,000 before you add a smart guidance system.
> Piracy against the book publishing firms makes no damn sense.
Regardless of what they're pirating, they're going to spoil it all for the rest of us. The net's a less free place now that it was before music sharing got popular, and you can bet that it will be even less free in the future as governments continue trying to crack down on pirating.
Pirating is a "Tragedy of the Commons" on a global scale.
> No, he is a lot better than Clinton. I know that is not saying much, but at least this President is helping saving the government embarassment by preventing the government from releasing more bad studies (like the phony EPA study about mythical "global warming").
> You can go to Kiersey's self-promotional site too, but it looks like they use some form of communist registration/info-gathering technique before they let you take the test.
No problem; I just registered as you.
If you see men in white jackets getting out of a van in front of your house, cut for the woods.
If they're escorted by law enforcement officers, take a change of underwear along.
> Yahoo's SCO Page has the money SCO execs have made by pumping the share price and setting automatic sell limits. When you consider how low the stock was its amazing that they put limits of $12 or more for a sell.
As I understand it, insiders can't just decide to sell on a whim when the price is right. They could announce a date of sale well in advance, but they really didn't know how well the FUD would be working on any given date. Programmed sales are a partial solution to this, but again, they didn't have any idea where the stocks would peak. I would guess that they hedged their bets by programming sales at 12, 14, 16, etc., so they'll get some loot even if it only makes it up to 13.99, but even more if it makes 14, 16, etc.
If I understood the insider trade reports that someone posted a month or two ago, several insiders bought large quantities at huge discounts, meaning that they never stood to lose more than pocket change even if the whole scam fell flat. In those circumstances the only "risk" is making less profit than they could have, but they must weigh the trade-offs between being too greedy and getting nothing (e.g., by programming the sale at $100) vs. being too timid and settling for too little (e.g., by programming the sale at $5). Programming blocks at different levels might be a good trade-off, since it would pocket them a few million if the scam flew at all, and might really pocket them a lot if the scam had legs.
> Actually, I find it kind of amusing that SCO publically laid our four examples where it claims IBM "illegally" added stuff to Linux; and, IBM trots out exactly four patents SCO is infringing upon... [...] The senior guys at IBM are thinking "Silly fools, you want to play IP games, then We'll play IP games!"
Of course, when they say "consumer demand" they're really talking about businesses' demands, but calling it "consumer demand" makes it look less like a privacy issue.
> Why shouldn't computers be intuative? Obviously I don't expect writing a full program to be simple, but it is my belief that writers of software should, within reason, try to do as much as possible to make computers as easy to use as possible.
I agree with the latter part; I just don't understand why people think the existence of tools like lsof whould be intuitive. It's a capability of your system, but no one was ever born knowing about it. Unless you want your computer reduced to a system with nothing but a box with an on/off button on it, you're going to have to learn some stuff.
But yes, application writers should think about how they implement things, and users should report things that the application writers have overlooked. This is true regardless of what OS you use, modulo your ability to actually contact the application writers for your system.
> But yes, many Linux people take the "1337er than thou" approach. There are people out there willing to help.
Haven't spent much time in the relevant parts of Usenet lately, but as of a few years ago you could always find all kinds of responses regardless of what OS or product you were asking about. The biggest difference in the Linux groups was that there were fewer people hanging around trying to sell you their help book, training program, etc.
> I did it yesterday. You just plugged it in and it worked (*). No special modules, no kernel recompile, no boot parameters. Apparently, the whole ide-scsi mess isn't necessary anymore. Just plug in and launch xcdroast. Dead simple.
That's true, but it's a fairly recent capability. Mine also "just works", but only after my most recent Linux upgrade.
All it takes is a few interested hackers and minimal information for vendors, and annoyances eventually get fixed. The way to make it happen faster is to get more people interested in Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
> The dream of a lifetime for you and me, pretty near statistically insignificant for Microsoft.
Yeah, they probably 'lose' more than that due to rounding errors when they run up their reports.
IMO, "an anonymous Fortune 500 company" is exactly as convincing an argument as "lots of unidentified source code".
I.e., a completely useless as a basis for argument, even if it happens to be true.
> Seemed to work out nicely except for the fact that I had to wake up 4 hours early that day to be at one of the polling stations. =(
Yeah, getting up at 10AM is a bitch.
> i can't say it ever gripped me. i enjoy it. watch it now and again when tivo records it for me and generally find it very funny but for some reason it never had that "must see the next episode now" magic.
Me neither, but notice that that description puts it far ahead of most of the crap you can find on television these days. Especially without a $90/mo cable habit.
> "Lufthansa Systems" is a spin-off company from "Lufthansa" the airline. They provide IT to many companies, airlines (e.g. Lufthansa") and others. This does _not_ mean, that Lufthansa (the airline) will switch to linux.
Well, at least for once most of us had an excuse not to lesen the article.
> Although they've increased the average ape intelligence by nearly 40% and even bread some individuals who are able to play simple games such as snap, they are unable to develop more advanced behavious such as speach and the concept of friendship.
I've never been able to master speach eather.
> It's always seemed odd to me that we are "up here" while apes and chimps are "down there" and other mammals kind of dribble down from that. Why nothing in-between?
Right now is sort of an anomaly in the family tree. For most of "human" history there were multiple species of "humans" living concurrently, and there were formerly many more species of ape alive at the same time too.
Also, the lack of in-between-ness is exaggerated by the nonlinearity of what has been going on in our species. If you compare the material culture of modern humans to that of chimps it looks like an unbridgeable gulf, but if you instead compare our material culture of 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, and 1,000,000 years ago to the current material culture of chimps, the gap really closes up.
It appears that a small difference in cognitive ability can make a huge difference when its results are allowed to accumulate over the millenia.
> It would be cool if there was some other species that slightly filled that gap bewteen us and the animals.
True, but arguably there already is. Take away the chimps and observe how wonderfully they fill the gap between ourselves and gorillas. Take away gorillas and observe how well they fill the gap between us+chimps and the other apes.
Our corner of the family tree is an interestingly dense bush as it is, and would be even more interesting if not for the extinctions over the past few million years.
Recommended readings:
"The Culture of Chimpanzees" (PDF) Overview of culture among chimpanzees.
"Planet of the Apes" (Just a tease; see the full article in your neighborhood library.) Breadth of the ape family tree in the Miocene.
"Hominid Species" What we currently know about our sub-branch of the family tree.
> My call is either it's a hoax, or it's that missing link anthropologists have been searching for. If it's the latter, it's a huge discovery.
No one is looking for any "missing link". The fossil record is full of "missing links", and the joke is that every time you find one you create two more, one to either side.
> > this could still turn into a Vietnam-style political issue if the killing and dying continues.
> 53 Americans have been killed in Iraq in the past 101 days. That is an avg of 0.52/day. The Capital of the U.S.A., Washington D.C., had 262 murders in 2002. That is an avg of 0.72 day. More Americans are being killed in our nations capital than in Iraq.
Yep. But in the political realm it isn't that kind of hard-core rationality that matters; it's the non-rational public reaction.
Look at how many people have died from West Nile or SARS vs. AIDS in the past year, and compare that to the amount of media coverage and public hysteria they've been generating. Look at how many people died in car crashes in 2001 vs. in the terrorist attack, and compare how much news time and public reaction each gets. Look at how for the past several years the media has nationalized ever suburban child abduction story and dwelt on it for days, meanwhile barely noticing the storm of assault and murder that surrounds us. We're just really jaded about certain topics, or at any rate some do a better job of pushing our buttons better than others.
Politicians who bet too much on a calculation that people "shouldn't" care are often headed for a big surprise. Johnson never could grok the difference between what people thought and what he thought they ought to think.
> It doesn't seem like anyone really cares about Iraq any more. The protests were heavy and numerous leading up to the war, but once it began everyone seemed to abandon the cause all but entirely.
There's a curious phenomenon at work here. IIRC, a couple of weeks before the war started the only way you could squeeze > 50% US public support out of the polls was to qualify the question with "with UN authorization", and even then the support was only about 60%. Without UN authorization it was somewhere down around 40%.
Those aren't very good numbers for a democracy to embark on a war with.
However, as soon as the shooting started the "support the troops" meme kicked in, and approval skyrocketed. I suspect it's something to do with guilt, i.e. the naive notion that not supporting the war must equate to wishing our troops harm.
> This is in stark contrast to the Vietnam war, which as far as I can tell (I could be wrong) resulted in protests through its entire duration.
I think there were no protests at all early on, though they grew to an avalanche as "the cause" caught on. And as for Iraq, there doesn't seem to be much point in protesting a done deal.
However, since the "deep support" (i.e., before the shooting started) for the Iraq war was not all that broad, and since the promised wonder of a native democracy overseeing US-built schools and hospitals and rebuilding itself with oil revenues doesn't seem to be anywhere in sight, this could still turn into a Vietnam-style political issue if the killing and dying continues. (Recall how delightedly the media were announcing four consecutive days without any combat deaths just a few days ago, and compare that to the gloomy tone of the news tonight.)
IMO things have gone much better than we had any right to expect so far, but unfortunately the fat lady hasn't sung yet. If things are still going like they are now when the elections come around next year you can look to a lot of "peace with honor" campaign rhetoric, i.e. how fast can we get the hell out without admitting we're giving up on it.
And that is where the Vietnam analogy fits in. During the Vietnam war the public was treated to a steady stream of glowing reports about the phenomenal casualty ratios, but ultimately it didn't make any difference. There's a heck of a lot more to winning a war than killing lots of people, high-tech warheads or no. Especially in a democracy.
> in countries where the "elite guard" means "soldiers with shoes"
But without pants, right?
> Anyone know how the approximate cost of a current steel-and-explosive shell?
I don't know about artillery shells, but for ariel bombs there's a nice chart in the February 2003 issue of Scientific American. Range varies greatly, from about $1000 for a dumb bomb to $700,000 for a cruise missile.
The JDAM "strap-on" combo uses a $20,000 guidance kit on a $1,000 - $3,000 bomb. There are other more expensive systems listed in the table as well, e.g. various types of cluster bombs cost $14,000 - $300,000 before you add a smart guidance system.
Modern warfare is expensive.
> Piracy against the book publishing firms makes no damn sense.
Regardless of what they're pirating, they're going to spoil it all for the rest of us. The net's a less free place now that it was before music sharing got popular, and you can bet that it will be even less free in the future as governments continue trying to crack down on pirating.
Pirating is a "Tragedy of the Commons" on a global scale.
> > "this President has been particularly bad"
> No, he is a lot better than Clinton. I know that is not saying much, but at least this President is helping saving the government embarassment by preventing the government from releasing more bad studies (like the phony EPA study about mythical "global warming").
Yeah, here's his latest attempt to save us from the bonds of ignorance.
> This case is threatening to be one in which only the lawyers come out of it with anything.
Oh, that really narrows it down!
> Once again, will rolls of tin foil have RFID's in them?
Surely you're not so trusting as to buy your tin foil at a supermarket!
> Anyway, who does this guy think he is, calling the Bush gang empire-building big-gummit perpetuatin' neoconservatives?
He's evidence that even kooks get something right now and then.
> You can go to Kiersey's self-promotional site too, but it looks like they use some form of communist registration/info-gathering technique before they let you take the test.
No problem; I just registered as you.
If you see men in white jackets getting out of a van in front of your house, cut for the woods.
If they're escorted by law enforcement officers, take a change of underwear along.
> Yahoo's SCO Page has the money SCO execs have made by pumping the share price and setting automatic sell limits. When you consider how low the stock was its amazing that they put limits of $12 or more for a sell.
As I understand it, insiders can't just decide to sell on a whim when the price is right. They could announce a date of sale well in advance, but they really didn't know how well the FUD would be working on any given date. Programmed sales are a partial solution to this, but again, they didn't have any idea where the stocks would peak. I would guess that they hedged their bets by programming sales at 12, 14, 16, etc., so they'll get some loot even if it only makes it up to 13.99, but even more if it makes 14, 16, etc.
If I understood the insider trade reports that someone posted a month or two ago, several insiders bought large quantities at huge discounts, meaning that they never stood to lose more than pocket change even if the whole scam fell flat. In those circumstances the only "risk" is making less profit than they could have, but they must weigh the trade-offs between being too greedy and getting nothing (e.g., by programming the sale at $100) vs. being too timid and settling for too little (e.g., by programming the sale at $5). Programming blocks at different levels might be a good trade-off, since it would pocket them a few million if the scam flew at all, and might really pocket them a lot if the scam had legs.
Just thinking out loud... IANAStockJock.
> Actually, I find it kind of amusing that SCO publically laid our four examples where it claims IBM "illegally" added stuff to Linux; and, IBM trots out exactly four patents SCO is infringing upon... [...] The senior guys at IBM are thinking "Silly fools, you want to play IP games, then We'll play IP games!"
As in, "We'll see your four and raise you 900."
Of course, when they say "consumer demand" they're really talking about businesses' demands, but calling it "consumer demand" makes it look less like a privacy issue.
> Why shouldn't computers be intuative? Obviously I don't expect writing a full program to be simple, but it is my belief that writers of software should, within reason, try to do as much as possible to make computers as easy to use as possible.
I agree with the latter part; I just don't understand why people think the existence of tools like lsof whould be intuitive. It's a capability of your system, but no one was ever born knowing about it. Unless you want your computer reduced to a system with nothing but a box with an on/off button on it, you're going to have to learn some stuff.
But yes, application writers should think about how they implement things, and users should report things that the application writers have overlooked. This is true regardless of what OS you use, modulo your ability to actually contact the application writers for your system.
> But yes, many Linux people take the "1337er than thou" approach. There are people out there willing to help.
Haven't spent much time in the relevant parts of Usenet lately, but as of a few years ago you could always find all kinds of responses regardless of what OS or product you were asking about. The biggest difference in the Linux groups was that there were fewer people hanging around trying to sell you their help book, training program, etc.
> > Have you ever installed an ATAPI CD burner?
> I did it yesterday. You just plugged it in and it worked (*). No special modules, no kernel recompile, no boot parameters. Apparently, the whole ide-scsi mess isn't necessary anymore. Just plug in and launch xcdroast. Dead simple.
That's true, but it's a fairly recent capability. Mine also "just works", but only after my most recent Linux upgrade.
All it takes is a few interested hackers and minimal information for vendors, and annoyances eventually get fixed. The way to make it happen faster is to get more people interested in Linux.